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Total cloud: Huawei's plan for planet's telcos and its own bottom line

China's emerging enterprise giant eyes major vendors' lunches, fetches cutlery

Huawei reckons it can outgrow its enterprise competitors without seeking a bumper acquisition and is going to spend two years cloud-enabling its entire networks product line.

Reports from the company's 2016 analyst summit in Shenzhen, China, suggest that rotating CEO Eric Xu (the company has three CEOs, who take six-month turns at the helm) reckons carrier and enterprise sales will hit US$80 billion by 2020.

The enterprise business alone should reach $10 billion by 2019, Xu said.

At that level of spending, Huawei's enterprise business would be beyond the likes of VMware, HDS and NetApp. The Chinese company has a rather more diverse portfolio than any of the three but also competes in virtualisation software, storage and servers.

Part of the growth will come from carrier capex, not terribly much. In spite of moves towards 5G, Xu expects only moderate capex growth through to 2020.

To get to the ambitious target of a roughly $70 billion slice of the carrier and service provider market, Huawei will have to embiggen itself at the expense of major competitors Cisco, Ericsson, and Nokia.

Xu hopes to take advantage of shifting carrier priorities. In the past decade or more, carriers around the world have been pouring money into retiring legacy networks for an all-IP architecture; in the next, Xu reckons, the money will be on turning everything into a cloud.

In response to this, the company's going to “cloudify” all of its products in the next two years.

Xu's reportedly told the analyst event that getting there will mean some small acquisitions that supplement its core technologies. Big Bang buys aren't on the agenda, however. ®

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